Default 20mph for Wales

[Biospace]

Why shouldn't someone be able to drive at 90mph where safe (and legal), without the gearing making this unpleasant?

I guess the "why can't" really comes down to a bigger discussion society is having about the price of energy and why having lots of money automatically gives you the right to consume as much fuel/energy as you want, thereby produce as many emissions as you want, despite the rest of society and the ecosphere paying for it.

They're talking about it regarding air travel, particularly private jets. I think I remember reading someone suggest a kind of energy tax where a basic minimum allowance of energy should be free for everyone, and only people using more than should pay for their excessive consumption. It's one of those scenarios where the poor, or conscientious individuals actally end up paying more than the rich and extravagant.

It's crazy that the pricing system for domestic energy is rigged in favour of those using more energy, penalising the thrifty. I have much sympathy for the idea of energy rationing, but it's in danger of encouraging a Chinese-style social credit system and monitoring people to a level I would see as unacceptable in peacetime.

I'd far prefer it to be socially unacceptable to be wasteful, through education and enlightenment. Scandinavian countries are managing this to some extent. That a 250mph 'supercar' should be seen as more desirable than a 250mpg supercar is crazy, given most will never have the time or money to fuel, insure and use such a car. Besides, a 600kg super-efficient 90mph machine could be made just as exciting to drive as one which consumes as much fuel as an HGV.

It all comes back to economic 'consumption' and the perceived social superiority many gain with more expensive and shiny purchases, not least the motor car. My daily car is a quarter century old Volvo (averages 45mpg, will sit at 125mph across Germany and is capable of running on a variety of fuels) - I can't see the sense 'investing' my money in a £10,000 machine which gets hard use, is left in railway station carparks, outside supermarkets and which depreciates faster than almost any other £10k purchase.

We'd do well to devise an economic system whereby consumption doesn't poison our soil, our air and our water, or other creatures. Because without, the future doesn't look too good.

[Albrecht]

It's crazy that the pricing system for domestic energy is rigged in favour of those using more energy, penalising the thrifty ...

Nicely written.

As far as "education", you have more faith than I in humanity. I think two elements go strongly against such a vision in this country (UK but likely elsewhere too). The first - and I'm diving head onto thin ice here, so I don't want it to be taken the wrong way - is a mass influx of individuals from nations and cultures way back in the socio-economic evolutionary scale, whose primary incentive for turning up is the acquisition of stuff that would be unobtainable "back home" things that didn't exist back there (including rule of law and road traffic legislation) and, hence, it'll be very difficult to ask them to give up said stuff before they've had any.

The second is a sort of extension of that, unable to express their masculinity (professional or monetary success via the acquisition of property) due the market in cities they live in, the males express it through the most common manner, a big or fast motor. So, they might be sharing an ex-local authority house or still living in an overcrowded family home, but they have a leased big black Merc or hotted up hatchback sitting outside.

Clearly Maslow's hierarchy of needs need to be modified to "Esteem needs: prestige, feeling of accomplishment, and a big shiney, or fast motor".

I was thinking about CVTs and I realised the same would apply to them. In principle, great, but would need geared down to match speed limits. Would be easy to do.

[Albrecht]

There is no need for a technical solution - cars are provided with a range of gears ... It is simply a matter of choosing the appropriate gear for the situation.

Either you really don't understand gear ratios, or you're just one of those people who can't admit when they are wrong, and refuse on principle to take in new information. Even when it's right.

How much torque does you car put out, and where (in rpm) is the sweet spot in your engine's output? Thanks. If you don't know, tell me which make and model and I'll let you know.

Even if there was some technical issue with gearing, no manufacturers are putting any effort into developing internal combustion engine cars anymore. The future is EVs.

Even EV's have transmissions too. They can also have pretty insane, instant torque outputs. But we'll be stuck with IC engines for a long, long time. Far more likely is a distinct drop in private transportation full stop, and it can't come fast enough for me.

As I wrote, there is no development work required to working out gear ratios. It's simple mathematics. It's more of a marketing problem that would require government intervention. As Biospace writes, there is an obsession with speed (even though it's literally criminal), a "bigger numbers are better" mentality, and a historical confusion, based on bad motor industry marketing, between horse power and torque (with few consumers really understanding the difference or latter).

I was not such a gearing junky, although in racing close ratio gearboxes always carried a purposeful cache, but a torque/camshaft junky. (How many people swop they cams to suit their driving or riding?)

All you need is torque, and increasing gear ratios improves it, albeit generally at the expense of top speed, which in our scenario becomes an added, extra bonus your general theory can't.

We seem obsessed with speed above all else in the UK and have been ever since our horse-riding aristocracy ... Good modern cars, even though they're overweight, too wide and engineered down to people's desires and expectations are more economical at 90mph than a typical British saloon was at 60mph. Had cars been limited to 60 or 65mph, it's unlikely these advances would have happened.

On the latter point, look again at Kei cars. They are up to 95mpg. Unfortunately too many British drivers are overweight, too wide and engineered down by their desires to fit into one too. There's a known phenomenon with goldfish that if you keep them in small crowded bowls, they'll remain small, but if you stick them in a bigger tank, they'll keep growing bigger to fill it.

On the former, I think it's true - car companies have long sold dreams of being racing, rallying, or Fast & Furious drivers, even if it's not possible to drive such cars at a fraction of their true performace - but I also think there are a variety of other motivations, like the MAD principle applied to bigger and bigger 4x4s/people wagons (mutually assured destruction in a collision), and luxury companies targeting those with disposable wealth, who lack the imagination to do anything better with their money. Or, perhaps just need to get rid of some.

[Jdsk]

My VW Polo (ICE) with it's standard (as built) gearbox will happily drive along at 20 mph or at 30 mph or at 40 mph. I can't believe my 17 year old car is the exception to the rule.

It isn't. That's also possible at 17 mph, 23 mph, 28 mph etc. And in cars with manual gearboxes and automatic gearboxes. And with combustion engines, battery power and hybrids.

Modern cars don't have narrow sweet spots where you have to stay "in the middle".

Anyone can go and out and test this, and please report back.

Jonathan

[Jdsk]

I do appreciate what you say about gearing not always making driving at a steady 20mph easy, without the engine revving a bit high, or bogging down. Some will have more trouble than others.

Would be OK for us I think. It's 30mph that's an issue. Our dashboard is constantly advising me to go up a gear at that speed, when I think it's OK where it is. We're more of one mind at 20mph.

Those gear change indicators use crude rules and only have a binary indicator. They're typically biassed towards economy.

With discontinuous gearing there's often more than one acceptable gear at any road speed and load.

If you take its advice does the engine feel unhappy?

Thanks

Jonathan

[Biospace]

As Biospace writes, there is an obsession with speed (even though it's literally criminal), a "bigger numbers are better" mentality

I do refer to the consumer obsession with speed (which is increasingly acceleration, now the roads are so clogged fair speed is all but impossible) but also to the state's obsession with it to the exclusion of all the other factors which contribute to road safety. Speed in itself is not dangerous, as the Victorians believed, it's inappropriate speed which is the problem.

Driving along a quiet motorway at 60mph may save a small amount of fuel but it's also a waste of time. Plenty of cars consume less energy and wear tyres less travelling at a steady 90 than a lumbering, unaerodynamic 4x4 at 60.

As far as "education", you have more faith than I in humanity. I think two elements go strongly against such a vision in this country (UK but likely elsewhere too)

I think we all have to have faith in our fellow Man, otherwise all is lost. Observe how the Poles were labelled all sorts of things for preferring not to sign up to the EU idea of welcoming economic migrants en masse by the globalist and 'progressive' elements, then not just invite whole Ukrainian families into their houses but organise it all themselves, from food at the border to finding a home to transport to it. We are naturally benevolent as a species, but also able to recognise when a few in power try to take advantage of this natural trait.

I was thinking about CVTs and I realised the same would apply to them. In principle, great, but would need geared down to match speed limits. Would be easy to do.

Surely all this talk of reducing the length of gearing would happen anyway if power output was reduced? And all the talk of automatic speed limitation is just round the corner, once partially self-driving cars take over. [/quote]

[thirdcrank]

Perhaps it's time to amend the thread title to reflect the fact that the legislation has now been passed by the Welsh government and the default 20mph limit for Wales is now coming into force next year.

[Biospace]

look again at Kei cars. They are up to 95mpg. Unfortunately too many British drivers are overweight, too wide and engineered down by their desires to fit into one too. There's a known phenomenon with goldfish that if you keep them in small crowded bowls, they'll remain small, but if you stick them in a bigger tank, they'll keep growing bigger to fill it.

Haha, yes! Unfortunately we associate size and mass with importance when it comes to motor cars, modern Range Rovers are the perfect example. The French and Italians have long legislated to limit the numbers of unnecessarily large cars and are smaller people than Germans and Brits, although I'm not sure if this is just because of their legislation for generally smaller cars!

The maximum power of a vacuum cleaners is legislated for, so why not motor cars? Just because you earn a lot of money shouldn't entitle you to buy a more powerful one. Unfortunately, the car is a cash cow for government and with a degraded public transport, it's not easy for most to live outside cities without one.

I'm not sure it's possible to remove this elevated status in Britain and America, but it should be possible to alter perceptions. Government appears to have lost power to multinational corporations which being ruled by profit alone could yet lead us, unintentionally or intentionally, towards a totalitarian society. Yet if a lightweight, fun to drive, economical yet swift car came on to the market, I believe the youth of today (and plenty of switched on older people) would be falling over themselves for one. The motor industry is now so large it's unlikely they would risk such a venture, only government could reliably create the initial demand.

How crazy is it where a massive 4x4 with petrol engine, electric motor and batteries - so even heavier than usual - is given free entry into low emission zones, despite weighing around two and a half tonnes and producing something like 400hp? Reviews quote figures of nearly 100mpg, which I very much doubt are realistic especially given a small battery range and research indicates only 50% of users don't bother to recharge from the mains.

We're in dangerous territory, especially when news media don't report reality clearly.

[Albrecht]

The maximum power of a vacuum cleaners is legislated for, so why not motor cars? Just because you earn a lot of money shouldn't entitle you to buy a more powerful one. Unfortunately, the car is a cash cow for government and with a degraded public transport, it's not easy for most to live outside cities without one.

Yup, the great "car economy" beloved of everyone from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, down to local governments looking to flush their coffers with parking fines, because it is so predicable.

"Dangerous territory" it is literally, with the car industries involved in what is basically an arms race with each other. I've seen with ex-acquaintances and a Daily Express "think of the children" kind of mentality. "Because there are 4x4s on the road, I've got to get an even bigger one, in case someone crashes into me", not considering what happens if they were to crash into someone else cyclists rather than them. In the US, on top of epidemic scale obesity and protein excessive and hormone laced diets leading to bigger people, it's become ridiculous. "Look Maw, a house on wheels" is no longer a punchline.

Yet if a lightweight, fun to drive, economical yet swift car came on to the market, I believe the youth of today (and plenty of switched on older people) would be falling over themselves for one.

Peel attempted a come back that would be happy with 20mph limits.

Unfortunately, suffered badly from hipster hyperinflation, e.g. £17,000 to £20,000 price tags. How? Should be the price of the scooter it is.

Surely all this talk of reducing the length of gearing would happen anyway if power output was reduced? And all the talk of automatic speed limitation is just round the corner, once partially self-driving cars take over.

I think self-driving cars, more like "driverless pods" will be part of the solution in civilised nations. Not sure the UK is heading in that direction.

Problem with power is aforementioned increasing fat b'stards. Try fitting 4 Middle Americans (would it be more PC to use hippos as an example), the direction in which certain demographics in the UK are headed, into a Mini car. You right but the evidence doesn't support the likelihood of it happening.

Making them too poor and forcing them to remain at home appears to be more like the way things are going. And forcing the boy racers onto electrical bikes and scooters, of which I'm already starting to feel more concerned about being hit by than cars, generally because they are on their phones at the same time as riding.

Do the maths on being hit by a 200lb, 6'2" teenager riding at 20 mph.

[Psamathe]

The maximum power of a vacuum cleaners is legislated for, so why not motor cars? Just because you earn a lot of money shouldn't entitle you to buy a more powerful one. Unfortunately, the car is a cash cow for government and with a degraded public transport, it's not easy for most to live outside cities without one.

Yup, the great "car economy" beloved of everyone from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, down to local governments looking to flush their coffers with parking fines, because it is so predicable.

"Dangerous territory" it is literally, with the car industries involved in what is basically an arms race with each other. I've seen with ex-acquaintances and a Daily Express "think of the children" kind of mentality. "Because there are 4x4s on the road, I've got to get an even bigger one, in case someone crashes into me", not considering what happens if they were to crash into someone else cyclists rather than them. In the US, on top of epidemic scale obesity and protein excessive and hormone laced diets leading to bigger people, it's become ridiculous. "Look Maw, a house on wheels" is no longer a punchline.
...

How much of this trend is a US/UK thing rather than a western culture thing. I lived in France for 4 years and none of the bigger is better culture but I was in a very rural area and the farmers all happily drove small Peugeot/Renault well beaten-up hatchbacks so my experience was maybe not representative. But does make me wonder how French farmers can happily manage with a beaten-up old small hatch-back yet UK farmers need a top of the line Range Rover/Discovery.

Ian

[Albrecht]

Even if there was some technical issue with gearing, no manufacturers are putting any effort into developing internal combustion engine cars anymore. The future is EVs.

A quote from Ian Henry of AutoAnalysis,

'The future of UK automotive manufacturing in 2025 and beyond'
'Long-term forecast paper for The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT)'

Forecasts developed by AutoAnalysis and just-auto.com suggest that hybrid adoption will continue to exceed EV adoption through to 2030, by which point Europe should have a hybrid penetration rate of 25%, versus an electric vehicle ratio of just over 4%

Whatever the autoindustry promises, you can safely extend that by 50 years (remember all the talk about hydrogen cars in the 1970s?).

In a slight defence of the auto industry, the problem with alternative power system, is that in order to transition to them, the industry has to be able to establish, run and afford two entirely supply chains at the same time (two because the old IC one will have to continue making spare and service parts). That doubles their costs, including human resources and R&D, while not increasing their income because they still sell the same amount of cars.

Alternatively, with my proposal, we can start tomorrow afternoon just keeping the one.

Anyone interested in a .gov response to driverless cars, see a new probably out of date paper entitled, MARKET FORECAST FOR CONNECTED AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES. A surprising 50% of cars already have some kind of connectivity installed. Let's just hope someone demands bicycle shaped filters in order for them not to start plowing down bicyclists because of a, "sorry mate, didn't see you" function.

It wouldn't seem hard to technologically trigger a 20mph maximum speed in one of them, on entering a GPS defined space. People would soon learn that 20mph was a brick wall and adapt just as quickly as they have to, say, not smoking in pubs (something I never believed could happen), at which point cycling become an even greater joy as we can overtake them, and they can't catch us.

No one else had boy racer types having to "beat" you to the next traffic lights (while you're riding a bicycle), or even try and block you off overtaking them back?

[Biospace]

The maximum power of a vacuum cleaners is legislated for, so why not motor cars? Just because you earn a lot of money shouldn't entitle you to buy a more powerful one. Unfortunately, the car is a cash cow for government and with a degraded public transport, it's not easy for most to live outside cities without one.

Yup, the great "car economy" beloved of everyone from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, down to local governments looking to flush their coffers with parking fines, because it is so predicable.

"Dangerous territory" it is literally, with the car industries involved in what is basically an arms race with each other. I've seen with ex-acquaintances and a Daily Express "think of the children" kind of mentality. "Because there are 4x4s on the road, I've got to get an even bigger one, in case someone crashes into me", not considering what happens if they were to crash into someone else cyclists rather than them. In the US, on top of epidemic scale obesity and protein excessive and hormone laced diets leading to bigger people, it's become ridiculous. "Look Maw, a house on wheels" is no longer a punchline.
...

How much of this trend is a US/UK thing rather than a western culture thing. I lived in France for 4 years and none of the bigger is better culture but I was in a very rural area and the farmers all happily drove small Peugeot/Renault well beaten-up hatchbacks so my experience was maybe not representative. But does make me wonder how French farmers can happily manage with a beaten-up old small hatch-back yet UK farmers need a top of the line Range Rover/Discovery.

Ian

This is a very interesting point, I mentioned UK and US rather than 'The West' because I've noticed this disparity also. We typically don't maintain vehicles very well beyond what is required by warranties and annual safety checks compared with the rest of Western Europe - in itself making cars on British roads more dangerous than any in Germany, for example. This could be a left over of when cars corroded badly (it's generally worse in our climate than the continental one), but you routinely see older car offered for sale in France with 400k km on the clock.

It's as if the motor car is all that's left to define people. I seem to remember reading about this in 'Driving Passion', a book about the psychology of the motor car. I notice how many English people, especially those in cars which have cost them a lot of money, are close to paranoid about being overtaken whereas in France and most other European countries it's not a problem. Similarly so in Scotland, especially the further North you go.

[Albrecht]

But does make me wonder how French farmers can happily manage with a beaten-up old small hatch-back yet UK farmers need a top of the line Range Rover/Discovery.

Two words ... government subsidies. You've clearly not seen the car collection of the "Hoof GP" on Youtube.

The other wonder is why suburban mothers or inner city dwellers need vehicles that were designed for farmers. The old "Chelsea Tractors".

I don't know about the North of Scotland, but the Irish countryside cracked me up, where two passing cars would regularly stop in the middle of the road for the drivers to exchange daily pleasantries.

One of the other great advantages to a national 20mph speed limit - and, yes, I meant national - is that it would hugely reduce the road kill of birds and animals.

An estimated 1m animals and 10m birds are killed on UK roads each year, £17m being spent on related motorvehicle repairs, and about 100 people suffering from fatal injuries as a result of deer related accidents. with many more animals suffering fatal injuries but crawling away from the roadside to slowly die or be eaten.

Add that to your overall costs. Reduce speeds to those that they have evolved to understand and can outrun or out manoeuvre, and you'll save all those lives.

A friend hit a cow on a motorcycle once, the bike was written off but the cow just walked away.

[Bmblbzzz]

I've heard 40mph cited as the maximum speed most animals can process. It's about the speed of a sparrowhawk in pursuit of its prey.

[Pete Owens]

Even if there was some technical issue with gearing, no manufacturers are putting any effort into developing internal combustion engine cars anymore. The future is EVs.

A quote from Ian Henry of AutoAnalysis,

'The future of UK automotive manufacturing in 2025 and beyond'
'Long-term forecast paper for The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT)'

Forecasts developed by AutoAnalysis and just-auto.com suggest that hybrid adoption will continue to exceed EV adoption through to 2030, by which point Europe should have a hybrid penetration rate of 25%, versus an electric vehicle ratio of just over 4%

Whatever the autoindustry promises, you can safely extend that by 50 years (remember all the talk about hydrogen cars in the 1970s?).

What does he imagine the other 75% are going to be powered by after 2030 when the sale of new petrol & diesel cars will be banned.

It isn't a matter of what the autoindustry promises, they are not investing resourses develeping products they will not be permitted to sell.